The Blue Fairy
Penny covered her ears against the silence, the slight sound of her hands cupping them being enough assurance that she had not gone deaf. In front of her, the Master both slept and did not sleep. His body did not let the night keep him from his work, but his mind was gone into that land of slumber. Penny's eye judges that he is fashioning a fearsome clawed table leg, made bizarre by the complete silence in which he worked. The knife on wood made no sound, seeming to pass through it with all the resistance of air. She crept into the Master's room cum workshop, only her willpower and a healthy dose of luck keeping her as silent her Keeper. On his nightstand, conspicuously missing the bed usually attached to such a piece of furniture, stood a startling bust of the Master. The bust serves to hold his cornmeal mush wig and, more importantly, his round spectacles. The light from them feebly competes with the moon's glare through the window. The blue star trapped in their depths is too far away to outshine much of anything. In a single breath Penny snatched the glasses and was out of the room. An easy task. Escaping before their absence is noted is far more dangerous. Her coat, supplies, and snow shoes await her where she left them. The doors unbar before her and she is soon out in the cold dead winter. Her snow shows crush the frozen mirror shards beneath them, saving her legs from her nightmares of them being torn to red ribbons. Despite her care Penny stumbles once and uses her clenched fist to catch herself. A snowflake spears her hand through, scraping against the glasses held within them. Only the abject fear of the snow covered ground saves her knees from buckling in pain. Drawing the shard from her hand goes far better, or possibly far far worse, than she expected. To her confusion, as the shard is drawn out it absorbs the shed blood into its surface, even calling the steam drifting from her wound into itself. Once pulled out in its entirety her hand reveals itself to be unmarred, only a dull ache to show for its recent trauma. Penny carefully wraps the mirror in goblin-leather and stows it away, knowing full well that such magic is either a blessing or a curse, and blessings should be cherished while curses should be understood. Once well away from the home of the Master, she addresses the glasses. “Estrella, I have a wish for you.” The Star in the spectacles shines brighter and speaks, the vibration of its voice traveling through the frame into Penny's arm. “You hold my prison, now speak the words. I will fulfill whatever wish is in my power to grant.” Penny clears her throat to ensure the clarity of her words, any misinterpretation may kill her. “Star light, star bright, The first star I see tonight; I wish I may, I wish I might, Have the wish I wish tonight. I wish to leave this place of fright, Please guide me home tonight.” The Star pulses with eagerness, then dims as if attempting to hide this outburst. Then it speaks, “You have made a wish beyond my power. I am distant from you and trapped, a feeling you know full well. If this is truly your wish, you must shatter my prison. However, I am obligated to tell you that releasing me will be a terrible thing that you will eventually come to regret and that my wrath will burn brighter than you can imagine. Decide now.” For Penny this was no choice at all, there was no decision to be made, and not a single worry for any of the ramifications of her actions. The glasses were already snapped in half and the lenses thrown to the ground to be ground into the razor sharp snow. Each piece of lens reflected its own star, which was then caught on the surrounding snow. From snowflake to snowflake the image of the star spread. The light is blinding. That cold blue star had shined dimly when trapped in the spectacles, but now, emanating from every mirror shard that had fallen with last night's blizzard, it floods the senses and scalds the skin. First the steam from Penny's breath evaporates, then the air in her lungs begins to burn, and she desperately staggers back from the wall of heat. Where the glasses had fallen, the blue light focuses and intensifies until a tiny blue star is formed, independent of any reflective surface. With a shudder and blast of displaced air the star suddenly doubles in size. The mirrored snow beneath it begins to melt into a pool of mercury, and Penny felt terror. There was a very good reason she wanted to escape in Winter, when there were few standing pools. “Stop! Please! You will attract the Dogfish and it will swallow us both if you give it a doorway!” A tree beside Penny begins to smolder and then fully burst into that same blue flame. The air vibrates around Penny as the Star begins to speak, each word licking at her feet with a tongue of flame. “I am granting your wish, child. The Dogfish will come, yes, and I will boil it in a sea of quicksilver. The Warden will come too, and I will burn him down in his petty little Bastille. The hounds will come and find no air to breathe, their baying silenced. The Rat will come and be as ash. And finally, He will come. The so-called Master will arrive and it will be glorious. And if you stay, you will burn before your time. You will burn alone without your tin soldier to comfort you, to add a more bitter tragedy to your end. It is necessary that star crossed lovers must first love. Keep your back to me and flee and you will find your way out. Wherever you see my light stay away, keep to the shadows, and you will find your home. Do not stop, for my wrath will only slow my peers, not end them, and I have no desire to provide recompense for a failed wish.” And so Penny fled through the Winter landscape, during a spreading Summer heat, with a Spring thaw sucking at her feet and soaking her coat with dripping quicksilver, and a chill Autumn fear crawling up her spine. She did stop one, out of the shadows, on top of a tall hill. She could see the Star had bathed the forest in a midday light, punctuated by bright blue flames devouring pockets of trees. She tells herself she cannot hear the souls inside of them burning. At the epicenter, where the Star has grown large and virulent, is a pool of molten mercury. In this pool the Leviathan lets out a scream too low to split ears, so it splits stone. Flashes of lightning burst from the ground around the pool, solidifying into trees that in turn catch fire, only to be put out by the waves caused by the frantic thrashing of this terrible beast. Boiling pockets of quicksilver on the beasts hide torment it, releasing toxic gases. Patches of ground lay exposed, the mercury evaporated, beneath the Dogfish, keeping it from diving to the safety of the Bottom. The scent of burnt flesh reaches Penny before she realizes she must turn away and continue running, always following the shadows, and sometimes shepherded by blue will-o'-wisps. It is a hard and long run, lasting days, fueled by goblin-fruit, and plagued by paranoia, but she eventually breaks through to a place half remembered. Disorienting greens abound, and children scream as they swing from bright red bars and fall down curved yellow slopes. Dogs without fish heads chase each other and colorful plates. And in the center is a brown tree with white flowers. Cherry blossoms. Characters involved in this Chronicle: Penny Category:Fiction